Knuth thinks machine learners are not geeks. What do you guys think.
Also he defines geek as people having certain qualities like understanding systems at different levels of abstraction.
Also he defines geek as people having certain qualities like understanding systems at different levels of abstraction.
Naturally there is some intersection, but these are all soft terms anyway. IMO geeks have lost overall everywhere, replaced by mainstream commercial interests because the tech world needed to grow very fast.
- a "total" or "100%" data scientist researching ML might spend the better part of his days in an office, without a computer, just thinking on a whiteboard and paper. He then hands specs for tech people to translate, implement, run (code, systems, workflow).
- "geek" means passionate (early 20th century word to describe "bookworms"), thus it may apply to anything — nowadays it's applied implicitly, without specifying further, to technology, "geek" means "tech geek". In that sense, whatever they do, geeks are never far from machines, gadgets, supercomputers (!?), some ethernet patch...
Both actually have nothing to do with each other, and do not seem mutually exclusive to me; but in the extreme range of the spectrum, they clearly are totally different people with unrelated concerns and, most likely, jobs.
But that's all fluff and you have to thank idling geeks for writing such blabla. (though I hear HR loves that kind of reports, profiling makes the world so easy, right? Hey, what do you know, someone somewhere might copy/paste these threads for a living as we speak).
I don't like games of telephone. Do you have a particular point in the video where Knuth says this? It will help to hear what Knuth says with his argument before I make a counterpoint (or maybe even agree with him).
> Also he defines geek as people having certain qualities like understanding systems at different levels of abstraction.
Knuth said this around the 7-minute mark. Nearly 20-minutes earlier than the machine-learning question. The discussion moved on, and I'm not entirely sure the two parts you bring up are related at all.